Orion Watson ’20 Awarded Summer Science Teaching Opportunity

The National Science Foundation program is a seven-week immersive program for twenty-four undergraduates interested in teaching in STEM fields at the secondary level.

Students are competitively selected from over sixty liberal arts institutions and receive a stipend for the program. During the summer, participants take a sixty-hour course in math or science pedagogy and engage in a subject area-specific teaching practicum under a master teacher mentor.  

Molly Prouty ’19 participated in the math TEU last summer and speaks very highly of the experience. She is grateful for “so many new and fresh ideas for instructional strategies to try in a STEM classroom.” These “hands-on teaching strategies” well supplemented the theory and practicum learned at Bowdoin. Prouty also lauds TEU for the relationships it encouraged among participants “who are passionate about math education, getting to know students and really caring about students' lives.”  

TEU provided an opportunity for Prouty to develop professional teaching skills, including linking curriculum to Common Core standards. As a current Bowdoin Teacher Scholar, Prouty notes that the co-teaching and mentor observation “helped me work better with other educators to collaborate on lesson plans and curriculum, which is something I do every day with my current mentor teacher.”  

Watson says he’s excited to see how to incorporate teaching into his scientific passions: “I've always been interested in science, especially physics and [Computer Science], but only recently considered education as a possible career path. I have always loved explaining theories and finally realized that I could probably do it for a living.” He’s planning on graduate school for Computer Engineering next year, but is still “considering becoming a high school physics teacher.”  

Congratulations, Orion!